


downtown harks back

by swordfishtrombones



Category: IT (2017), IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: IT 2019, M/M, Pining, Unresolved Romantic Tension, emetophobia warning sry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 10:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20580833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swordfishtrombones/pseuds/swordfishtrombones
Summary: At this rate, Richie thinks with his head dangling in the bar toilet, soon he’ll be averaging one good puke a day.





	downtown harks back

At this rate, Richie thinks with his head dangling in the bar toilet, soon he’ll be averaging one good puke a day. 

The Derry that Richie remembers only had five bars, but they’ve tripled since he was seventeen and trying to convince the door guy he was only there for fries. Probably he didn’t need much more after drinking his way through Bev’s miserable little _memento mori _moment, but he had still gotten in his car afterward and driven around downtown in search of a bar that didn’t have the word “haus” or “company” in the name. Inside, he had ordered a mystery shot with a huge grin on his face, and then kept ordering them until the bartender stopped making celebratory comments about the weekend.

He pulls his head out of the toilet bowl, catches the sight and sick-sweet tang of his own chunky orange vomit, and gags again. He spits translucent yellow bile until there’s nothing left, then leans back against the bathroom wall and groans.

“Enjoy the crab rangoon, asshole,” he says to the toilet, and shuts his eyes until someone starts banging on the door.

+

Richie walks the forty-five minutes back to the inn because he’s seeing in multiples and has found, his sides stitched with grim laughter, that Derry is yet to discover Lyft. Fingers crossed that his car will still be there in the morning.

It’s easy to forget about the trees when you leave Maine. There’s great hiking in LA, everyone says it, but Richie’s been on the road for what feels like years, and anyway, the whole appeal of a city is that there are always people around and the lights stay on all night. Maine is deranged. The balsam firs are low and dense and miles deep. They sweep over the road like hands, grabbing at the pavement cracks, the potholes, the artistic tire marks left by bored, crazy-going teenagers. Every few steps, Richie smells some new combination of dirt and leaves and rot that he hasn’t smelled in years, and it makes him shiver each time. He’s just about reached his capacity for rediscovered memories.

Richie walks in the middle of the road and doesn’t need to dodge a single car. Streetlights appear sporadically and far apart, and for long stretches the brightest thing on earth is moonlight reflecting off the painted road lines.

“This would be a really good time to kill me,” he tells the trees, and then laughs again when they don’t. “Pussy,” he says, which is a word he hasn’t said since he was about twenty-two, but which he has said at least five times in the past eight hours. It feels weird in his mouth. The list of things he’s too old for just won’t stop growing.

\+ 

He’s back in the inn just past midnight, and God, it’s not even that late, how fucking hilariously embarrassing. Richie sinks onto his screaming 41-year-old knees and crawls four-legged up the staircase. Maybe there’s a way to pitch this as a bit for the show, he thinks, and wheezes hysterically at the idea. _ Anyone here tonight ever go back home to fight the fucking alien clown who tried to literally eat you twenty-seven years ago, only to realize that’s not even your least favorite repressed memory? You know what I’m talking about! _

He bites the inside of his cheek to stop from laughing out loud; Ben and Bev and Bill and Eddie all have rooms off the same hallway. They all wound up at the same inn because it is the inn that exists. Maybe he should’ve gone with the Motel 6, he thinks, once he’s upstairs and crawling to his room as quietly as he can manage. Might have bed bugs but at least it doesn’t have people who know him.

In his room, he folds himself into the faded quilt and stares at the ceiling, trying to decide if what it’s doing constitutes spinning. Blearily, he imagines what he’ll say to the others in the morning. There aren’t many good possibilities. _ Forgetting you all exist has been an important part of having a life, so with respect to my therapist I would like to get back to that now. _Something like that.

Sickening. Richie shuts his eyes, forces himself to relax his brow, and slows his breathing. He will not be sick again.

+

You can’t get over someone until you get under someone else, and Richie has done a lot of getting over and getting under. He’s pretty much figured it out; nothing goes away on its own. He’d spent nine months of the last year fucking a TV actor, but then the actor started getting movie roles and more press, and the gossip mag speculation had sucked more than the sex had been fun. Seeing interviews with the actor still makes Richie feel horny and irritated. He had to cut off all contact and fuck around a little before he could live with it. But at least it hadn’t been love.

The Eddie memories are fuzzy, but not like the other memories. They exist in a different space. Richie’s recollection is a gradient edged up against a burst of light. He can remember almost everything about his first year in California: the boisterous joy of being alone, of being with people, of staying out past midnight. He even remembers a few agonizing phone calls to Boston before those petered out for good. It was easy to get lost in his new life. He hadn’t known that Eddie had moved to New York, or gotten married, or that his mother had died. It turned out it was possible to become strangers. 

But there’s still a lot in the gradient, and it’s coming back to Richie in fits and starts. That first, dreamlike time in Portland, so surprising and simple Richie had wondered why he’d ever been scared. And then the second, harder time in Boston, sleeping on Eddie’s carpet, and then squeezed into his twin XL bed, and then on the carpet again. Two months later Richie would drop out of USM and fly across the country, as far as he could get from Eddie’s dorm and every memory he still had of growing up. 

You can leave your hometown––you can even forget it. But you can’t snatch memories of yourself out of other people’s brains. Richie could shred every picture of himself, scourge his social media, rework his persona, but there’s no getting rid of a past that other people remember. 

+

He wakes up an hour later, standing in the bathroom doorway with Eddie’s hand on his shoulder.

Eddie is still in his clothes, toothbrush in the hand that’s not on Richie. “Richie? Richie?” 

Richie’s eyes are already open. He squints at Eddie, brings his hands up automatically to Eddie’s arm. 

“Sleepwalking?” Richie asks him.

Eddie nods.

“Shit. I used to do that all the time.”

“Yeah, I know,” says Eddie. “You’d do it at my house, remember? Come and curl up at the foot of my bed like a dog.”

Richie groans. He blinks a few times, trying to reset and tell if he’s still drunk or just foggy and confused in that post-sleepwalk way. Sleepwalking is fucking weird. He can never remember waking up from it, he just drifts between degrees of consciousness. Unless someone comes and wakes him. It’s been years since he did it last.

Eddie’s hand drops off of his shoulder. “Are you drunk?” 

Richie tries to focus on the wall. “Hard to say.” 

“Great. You want to fight It with a hangover?”

“Your mom gets hangovers,” Richie mumbles.

“Good one.”

Eddie is looking at him, looking for something. Kind of unfair, considering they can’t really do it at the same time without things getting weird, and all Richie wants is to look and look.

“_Are _ you okay?” Eddie asks.

“Don’t ask me that, man, you sound like my manager. Are any of us okay?”

“No,” Eddie says. “You’re right.”

He fiddles with his toothbrush for a beat and looks furtively over his shoulder down the hall. Richie’s heart rises and sinks at the same time.

“Hey,” says Eddie. “Not that this is the right moment, or that it’s the biggest thing going on, but. I’ve been wanting to say. All this supernatural memory loss bullshit. Just a twenty-four hour cycle of reliving shit, right?”

Richie nods. He knows where this is going and only half wants to get there.

“There’s remembering the fucking clown, and then there’s also, like, remembering stuff I was trying to forget the normal way.” Eddie sighs and leans against the bathroom door frame. “You getting that too?”

“Yeah, man.” Richie looks over Eddie’s shoulder, but no one is stirring. “Can’t believe I forgot how bad your breath reeks, that must’ve taken at least twenty years of repression.”

Eddie wields his toothbrush like a dagger. “If I get blood on this I won’t be able to use it.”

“Keep it away from me, then, for everyone’s sake.”

Eddie grins at him for a second and then lets it slide away. “Just want to say, I’m sorry I made you sleep on the floor that time. I don’t know if you even remember. But I’m sorry. I think I spent a lot of time wishing I hadn’t.”

Richie kind of laughs. His life is fucking unbelievable. No rest.

“It wasn’t that bad,” he says. “The bed, the floor, whatever. I’m game. You wanna see a grown man scratch his ears with his feet? People pay me to make a fool of myself now.”

“I’ve seen your show,” Eddie says. “Glad you found a way to make being a dumbass pay.”

“I’m a dancing monkey.” Richie gives his best teeth-bared monkey grin. “Really. I’d sleep on your floor like a dog right now if you wanted me to.”

Eddie laughs quietly.

Richie’s grin is locked in place. “I’m serious,” he says.

Horribly gently, Eddie says, “I know you are.” 

Why the fuck does everything have to be like this, Richie wonders. Once you’ve sworn a blood oath to murder a killer clown in your hometown’s sewage system, other aspects of your life should get to be normal. 

“So?” he says.

“Not right now.”

“Maybe later?”

“Go sleep in your own bed, Richie.”

“That’s no fun,” Richie mumbles.

“I’m no fun, remember?” Eddie shoves him gently. “I gotta brush my teeth. You should too. You don’t smell so fresh either.”

+

Back in bed, Richie lies on his back and does the breathing exercise again with his hand cupped loosely around his dick. When he used to smoke pot regularly all it took was one puff too many and he’d spend the next couple hours on the floor, flooded with absolute pointless despair and profound self-disgust. Didn’t mix with his meds or his brain or something. So he doesn’t smoke anymore. But something to calm him down would be good. 

What he has now is square breathing. He inhales _ one two three four, _ holds _ one two three four, _ exhales _ one two three four, _holds. He tries not to think about getting his heart to slow down, because that’s not something he knows how to control, and sometimes thinking about it makes it worse.

Being a person with a loud brain is a fucking curse, maybe worse than the clown thing, not to be dramatic. At least you can kill the clown, supposedly. You can kill the brain, too, but Richie is trying not to do that. 

He is drifting, doing his best not to notice anything. He keeps tripping over thoughts, but doing the thing his therapist says to do, seeing the thought and acknowledging it and then letting it go. In this way, he finds another memory he didn’t know he still had: crunching Cheetos over Eddie’s dorm desk, Eddie snapping at him for getting orange dust on his RA-issued list of resident birthdays, laughing at Eddie for caring, the air being knocked out of him as Eddie jumped onto his back.

Crunching, snapping, laughing, jumping, crunching, snapping, laughing, jumping. It repeats in his head for so long that in the morning, he’s not sure whether he had never gotten to sleep, or if the thought had just melted into a dream. 

**Author's Note:**

> title from the [sharon van etten song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7sTHoeH0eA)
> 
> i had a lot of fun writing this leetle thingie. shoutout to the writers of it chapter 2 for making the characters so busy there's basically no time for them to get up to anything offscreen. thanks for reading!


End file.
